Definition of "dressing down" []

• Present participle of dress down. (verb)

Wiktionary.org : Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• "Haranguing that cadet had been a great deal of fun, and he was debating the merit of making a surprise inspection of engineering at some point, and verbally dressing down the students for anything he found amiss."
• "The dressing down finished to his satisfaction, the King resumed his course toward Re'zonville, halting, however, to rebuke in the same emphatic style every group of runaways he overtook."